SELWESKI: The Rural (Republican) Party can't put 2 and 2 together

In his speech to the Democratic National Convention in September, Bill Clinton warned that the Mitt Romney campaign was lacking in the area of basic arithmetic.

The former president referred to Romney’s tax cut plan, but he could have just as easily cited the Romney camp’s failure in Electoral College math. Unlike the conventional wisdom, I would suggest that the Republicans’ weaknesses can be pinpointed in rural Red States like Wyoming, Utah, Oklahoma and Kansas.

As establishment Republicans thrashed the Romney campaign with breathtaking speed in the 10 days following the election, the widespread gnashing of teeth focused on the GOP nominee’s “47 percent” comment, compounded by his post-election claim that President Obama bought the election by showering government “gifts” upon his favorite low-income constituencies. Running mate Paul Ryan blamed “urban” voters for the loss

Within hours or days after President Obama declared victory, big-name conservatives had quickly pivoted to the middle, declaring that immigration reform is needed, and additional tax revenues must be part of any plan to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” In the process, Romney’s bold tax cut plan and many of the supposedly winning ideas put forward by the Romney-Ryan team were tossed onto the trash heap of presidential campaign hyperbole.

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The blunt message from current and former Republicans governors – from Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie to Jeb Bush and Haley Barbour -- was that the GOP tent must expand and diversify if it seeks to profit at the ballot box in 2016.

In near unanimity, political analysts pointed out that emerging U.S. demographics expose the GOP as a party of white men while Democrats scored well on Election Day with women, Hispanics, young voters and blacks.

But I wonder if the party’s problem is that they have come to rely too much on America’s rural voters at the expense of typical suburbs like Macomb and Oakland counties.

Post-election interviews with officials and voters in neighboring Oakland County – once a rock-ribbed GOP stronghold – indicate that Obama won there, especially among women voters, in part because suburban, cosmopolitan Republicans want a return to political moderation. They’re turned off by the Republicans’ embrace of tea party politics.

From a geographical standpoint, GOP stalwarts nationwide look at the Electoral College map from Nov. 6 and wonder how their presidential candidate lost. Worse yet, the county-by-county election results show a sea of red stretching from Idaho to Georgia, from Arizona to Kentucky.

But if Republican strategists study the numbers, it becomes abundantly obvious that the GOP should no longer pay heed to the rural states of the West and the Great Plains.

The staunch conservatism in that stack of states from North Dakota down to Oklahoma and northern Texas -- with Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Utah tossed in -- has distorted clear thinking on the Republican side of the aisle.

The Republicans can afford to create some distance between those Plains and Mountain State voters without risking anything. The degree of GOP support there is overwhelming, so there is no reason to fear a damaging disconnect with the party base or the impact of a low turnout.

As the Rural Party, the GOP approach has maintained huge majorities in those nine rustic states for a few decades. In January, those non-battleground states will provide nearly 40 percent of the Republican senators on Capitol Hill. But the 21st Century math works against their partisan caucus in winning the White House.

Consider this:

• In Alfalfa County, Oklahoma, Romney captured a stunning 85 percent of the vote. But he accomplished that margin by accruing 539 votes. In comparison, each of 24 precincts in one Macomb County community, Clinton Township, produced more than 539 votes for Barack Obama.

• In San Juan County, Utah – a huge county with a geographic reach that probably exceeds the Metro Detroit tri-county area – Romney won comfortably with 58 percent, or 3,006 votes. But it’s only fair to point out that in the city of Fraser, Obama beat that tally with 3,946 votes.

• In Wyoming, Romney garnered nearly 70 percent of the electorate, adding more than 170,000 votes to his overall Election Day total. But that statewide result fell short of Obama’s haul in Macomb County alone by 30,000 votes.

No cherry-picking is needed here – similar results can be found in every rural state, including some in the South.

These sparsely populated territories are dominated by people driven by nostalgia and regressive politics, many of whom enjoy living a 19th Century lifestyle. They fit comfortably into the rigid GOP base of xenophobic whites living outside the mainstream, embracing the red-meat rhetoric of the “Republican Entertainment Complex” on TV and talk-radio. It should also be noted that these states have populations lacking minorities, single women and college graduates – the very demographic blocs that have emerged as a huge Democratic advantage, despite some of the Dems’ strident political positions.

It is the voters and senators and representatives of those states that help push the GOP into foolish, archaic policies such as making an issue of contraceptives, or opposing an abortion-exception for rape, or stubbornly fighting against same-sex marriage. They also encourage Republican hypocrisies on generous farm subsidies and tax credits for ethanol.

Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton dragged the Democratic Party back to the mainstream in the 1990s and showed that he could ace Electoral College math.

Certainly, the GOP does not want to take its cue from Clinton. But they better find somebody who knows how to make the numbers add up.